Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.

- Gibran, Kahlil

Best Quotes about Wisdom

Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually marked by an ill placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.

Rowland, Helen

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

James Boswell

Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold. She is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her. [Proverbs 3:13-15]

Bible

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.

Elizabeth, Queen

If you wish to know the road up the mountain, ask the man who goes back and forth on it.

Zenrin

We cannot advance without new experiments in living, but no wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before.

Adams, James Truslow

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.

Aristophanes

Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

10.

The beginning of wisdom is to desire it.

Gabirol, Ibn

11.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

Quintilian

12.

Wisdom makes a slow defense against trouble, though a sure one in the end.

Goldsmith, Oliver

13.

Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.

Walt Whitman

14.

Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.

Lee, Robert E.

15.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

16.

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

19.

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes, -- every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy.

Marden, Orison Swett

20.

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

Ziggy

21.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

22.

By the time your life is finished, you will have learned just enough to begin it well.

Marx, Eleanor

23.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know -- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

Asimov, Isaac

24.

Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation.

Taylor, Sid

25.

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

Cato The Elder

26.

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

Plato

27.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it, thou art a fool.

Azai, Rabbi Ben

29.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Butler, Samuel

30.

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

31.

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be lead by the nose.

Twain, Mark

32.

Wisdom is meaningless until our own experience has given it meaning.

Evans, Bergen

33.

The end result of wisdom is... good deeds.

Talmud, The

34.

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

35.

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

Smiles, Samuel

36.

When you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you life in the wisdom of the Self.

Bhagavad Gita

37.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Gibran, Kahlil

38.

If I don't have wisdom, I can teach you only ignorance.

Buscaglia, Leo

39.

I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.

Hesse, Hermann

40.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Saroyan, William

41.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

Quarles, Francis

42.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

What a wonderful world this would be if there were as many wise people as there are clever people.

44.

Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.

Covey, Stephen R.

45.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

46.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Bacon, Francis

47.

Many people might have attained wisdom had they not assumed they already had it.

48.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life -- in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Seneca

49.

The wisest have the most authority.

Plato

50.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Freud, Sigmund